


there is a girl, and she can be anyone

by thepalebluedot



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Genre: Gen, xmen first class ensemble makes a brief appearance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-09
Updated: 2019-07-09
Packaged: 2020-06-25 04:34:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19738414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepalebluedot/pseuds/thepalebluedot
Summary: There is a girl, and she can be anyone, and she does not know who to be, but she knows she cannot be herself, because herself is blue skinned and yellow eyed, and people are not blue.





	there is a girl, and she can be anyone

**Author's Note:**

> slowly but surely getting back into writing so I've been going through my google docs and posting stuff i wrote a few years ago because fuck it. this is one of those things.

There is a girl, and she can be anyone.

There is a girl, and she can be anyone, and she does not know who to be, but she knows she cannot be herself, because herself is blue skinned and yellow eyed, and people are not blue.

There is a girl, and she can be anyone, so she is everyone. She picks faces from her memory and wears them around. She picks faces from the people walking by, from the backgrounds of pictures, from the covers of books. 

She picks faces and she wears them, and the faces are not her own; they are older and younger and prettier and uglier and male and female and neither, they are everyone. She is everyone. She is whoever she chooses to be, and she is no one. 

She picks faces that blend in, and she takes money from cash registers because she’s wearing the face of the cashier and because she does not know how else to get money. She does not know how to get a job, because she does not know what face to wear for a job interview, she does not know of a face she could keep. 

There is a girl, and she can be anyone, and so she is everyone, and she gets by. She borrows faces and with them she borrows entire identities, she borrows their jobs to steal a meal, a hotel room, a new shirt. She borrows faces to get by, and she is lonely, and she could take someone’s entire life if she chose to and no one would be the wiser, but she is not that lonely, she is not that cruel. It scares her that the thought even crosses her mind.

There is a girl, and she can be anyone, and because she can be anyone, she can go anywhere, so she goes everywhere. She wanders because she can; she wanders because she has nowhere else to go. She wanders into mansions and expensive restaurants and high end hotels, and she wanders into crooked streets lined with crumbling buildings and poverty, and she gives some of what she’s taken, and for a time, she feels less alone. She feels like Robin Hood, she feels like she’s helping, and it’s not enough, but it’s all she can do, and their smiles are genuine and she feels less alone.

She wanders into mansions, and she hears footsteps, and she remembers the pictures on the walls and borrows their smiling faces and hopes that the footsteps won’t belong to whoever’s face she’s wearing. She wanders into a mansion, and she hears footsteps. They are light and quick like a child's, so she borrows the mother’s face and smiles at the little boy who walks in.

There is a girl, and she can be anyone, but she does not know anything at all about the people she is. Most of the time, she only borrows faces long enough to get what she needs, and there has been little need to actually be the person the face belongs to. She is young and she is alone and she can look like anyone, and she realizes that it is not the same as being anyone.

There is a boy, and he can know anyone, and he doesn’t know her, but he knows that she is not his mother. 

There is a girl, and she can be anyone. There is a boy, and he can know anyone. They are both different, but they are different kinds of different. There is a girl and there is a boy, and they are just that, a girl and a boy; they are children. They do not know that different kinds of different matters, not yet. They know that they are different, and they know that they are lonely, and to them it is easy. Just like that, they have each other.

There is a girl, and she can be anyone, and she does not know how to be herself; she has been other people for far too long. There is a boy, and he is smart, and he knows that he cannot tell her how to be herself. Instead, he helps her figure out her own face, and it is not blue and her eyes are not yellow, but it looks like her face. Her eyes change color and her hair is a different shade every day, and it is not really her face, because her face is blue skinned and yellow eyed, but it is a face that resembles her blue one, and it is no one else’s face, and it is enough.

She grows into this face, and she decides she likes blond, and she decides she like brown eyes and blue eyes and purple eyes and, when she’s looking for a laugh, red eyes.

There is a girl, and she can be anyone, and she is not quite herself, but she is close enough, and she likes it well enough, so it doesn’t matter. There is a boy, and he can know anyone, but he does not want to know everything about everyone; it isn’t nearly as fun as it sounds. It isn’t fun at all, so he reigns in his mind and learns to distinguish thoughts from spoken words and he gives himself a tell that he doesn’t really need. He gives himself a tell because it is also a reminder, and it makes him feel better, and it makes her feel secure.

Her eyes are brown today, and they are both wearing black, and he puts two fingers to his temple even though he doesn’t need to, and he tells her all about the gravedigger, who just so happens to be a making fun of them all in his head. (Look at the lot of them, filthy rich, only here because it’s proper, I bet they don’t even know this guys middle name.) They make fun of themselves and the rest of the people dressed in black right along with him. 

Her hair is short today, and they are sitting in the library, and he is looking at three different books at once and spinning tangents that make no sense to her, and as far as she can tell, they fade out after a few sentences anyway. He tells her about genetics, and it all goes over her head; he was always smarter than she was, to her, the books might as well be written in hieroglyphics. She lets him talk at her, because the noise is comforting, and because what else does she have to do.

She is a servant today, or at least she looks like one, and he is a scared little boy (although really, he is not so little, not anymore) and she cannot help him, she only has the ability to hide herself, and he is too scared to try and use his own abilities, too scared of what he might do. He is running but he isn’t fast enough, and their new step brother, the one who is living up to his namesake, is jealous and mean and petty, and he does not know his own strength. Or maybe he does, and he just doesn’t care. She hides and he runs and at the end of the day, he has a new bruise that she doesn’t ask about and they fall asleep on each other’s shoulders in the library.

There is a boy, and he can hear all the unpleasant thoughts sent his way, and he finds that there is a lot of them. But he is smart. He is small and he makes himself look fragile, he makes himself into the opposite of a target. He can hear all the unpleasant thoughts sent his way so he makes it his mission to be the better man, because if he isn’t, it will drive him insane. He searches for hope where there is none, and he tries to see the best in people, because there is no privacy in his world and while he despises it, he has to live with it, has to believe that there is still good in people.

It get’s hard, sometimes, but he is good at pretending. Both of them are good at pretending.

There is a girl, and she can be anyone, and she begins to wonder why she cannot just be herself. 

There is a boy, and he can know anyone, and he begins to wonder why he cannot shut it off.

The boy goes to college. Needless to say, a university is nothing like a big empty house. There are more people, a number exponentially larger than his old household staff. There are so many thoughts in his head, all tangled up, and it’s difficult to sort them out, to sort his thoughts out from the others. 

The girl goes him to college because he is her only family, her only constant, her only friend. She does not attend, she has never been as smart as him, and she doesn’t have the same thirst for knowledge, and she’s never been good at sitting still, staying still, she barely passed high school as it is. She couldn’t be bothered. 

She could be anyone, and she didn’t need a diploma, but now she has one anyways. She gets a job, and he studies, and they have their own apartment where she is free to be blue skinned and yellow eyed.

They don’t have many friends, the pair of them, although they are both very friendly, a skill picked up from years of galas and dinner parties. They don’t have many friends because they don’t really know how to have friends, how to keep friends, what it entails to really be a friend, and so they have acquaintances and strings of exes and countless one night stands.

He is good at what he does, and he is smart. Incredibly so. He learns about genetics, he learns about himself and he figures himself out, why he is the way he is, why she is the way she is. He doesn’t figure out specifics, or how it works exactly, but he figures out why, and it is enough. He is good at what he does and somewhere along the line he becomes a professor, with nebulous hopes of finding or helping others like him, like her. 

He has his tell, two fingers to the temple, not like he uses it around anyone but her, and she has blonde hair and brown eyes, because she sees the same people every day and decides to keep up appearances. He manages to keep his thoughts separate from those around him, and she pretends it isn’t exhausting to be fair skinned and brown eyed all the time.

There is a woman, and he can’t focus on her words, not with the alcohol muddling his mind, twisting up spoken words and private thoughts, mixing up whose voice is whose, so he just looks into her mind. It’s easy to find what she’s trying to tell him about, it’s at the forefront of her thoughts, and there is a woman with diamond skin and a man with a tail who can teleport and the world is suddenly so much bigger.

There is a girl, and she can be anyone, and she is the government officer sitting at the other end of the table, and then she is her blue skinned yellow eyed self. It convinces them to believe their story, and she convinces herself it was worth it.

There is a man who can control metal. There is a boy with feet that let him hang off the ceiling. They are fascinating, and they tell him to stay out of their heads, like he didn’t already know. He was never in their heads in the first place, their thoughts just spill out and he overhears the bits and pieces they hardly bother to keep to themselves. 

There is a girl with wings and acid breath, and a boy whose body changes to help him survive, and a boy who produces rings of energy, and a boy whose voice breaks glass. There is a man with red skin, who can teleport, and a man who creates waterspouts, and a man who absorbs and releases energy. There is a boy whose body changes to help him survive, and there is too much energy, and he can’t adapt, and they lose him. There is a boy who can know anyone, and he is thankful for the helmet that shields thoughts, because he doesn’t want to know what goes on in its owner’s mind. He does not want to know at all.


End file.
